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Why do you use a systemd-less distro (if you do)? (programming.dev)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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I'm curious to know why people use systemd-less distributions. Which one would you recommend to someone who wants to stop using systemd?

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[–] 3 points 2 days ago (4 children)

If you mean by abilities, I agree. Most of the tuning that exist on systemd doesn't exist for runit, at least out of the box or to my knowledge. However what I meant is, with systemd I don't know what's going on on my system, with runit I know every single service because I put them there in the first place. Of course systemd covers most of the things nowadays, while I have to deal with power management, networking, display manager, login manager etc all separately. Doing the Unix way is simple, while systemd grew to be quite complex.

For my daily usage it suffices. For my home server, I still prefer Debian with systemd (though I'm checking Alpine nowadays) because I'm lazy for that case and systemd does everything for me.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    Systemd is unix-way, systemd the manager is one program it comes with journal, but everything else under systemd project is either optional or separate utility that designed to work well with other utilities under systemd project, kind of like coreutils.

    I understand your position I think it's empowering to do it your way. 👍🏽

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Heh, there is a joke running as "systemdOS", they have too many optional utilities. :)

    Thanks! I think I like simpler inits because I started using Linux before systemd (mostly OpenRC or SysVinit for me those days, but even though I used Ubuntu for quite some time I don't really know about Upstart).

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    I too have started using linux some time before systemd adoption, but because my work involved a lot of system administration and infrastructure administration simplicity of sysv-style and bsd-style inits was detrimental to my mental health, so when systemd came it was something from another world, tickled me just right and documentation was insanely good and detailed, and it absolutely changed everything. There is also an obvious problem of people reductively thinking of systemd project as a whole as an init system, it isn't just that it's a system management system and it works great. Other systems just doesn't use what linux provides and instead reiterate on old designs.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago

    Yeah, I agree systemd makes things easier for sysadmins, and with every components of it to be fair. It's quite a huge project at this point, does way more things than a mere init system, I guess that's the argument of it being not so Unix-like. It's made specifically for Linux so it probably doesn't work on BSDs, though I have no idea honestly. Wayland was suppose to be the same and it works on some BSDs now apparently. Anyway, if I imagine system administration on bigscale, I think I would go with systemd as well.

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